Fly Paper (An Arsenic Story Told in Four Acts)

Act I:

In September, I flew to Sioux Falls to talk about – yes – poisons at the South Dakota Festival of Books. I was tired; I was cranky; the hotel room service menu turned out to be an alcohol-free zone; I stayed cranky. Not that I’m an author attached to alcohol or anything like that.

Anyway, the place did have coffee (not that I’m an author …) and the next day I discovered that the downtown featured a charming little arts district and that the festival itself was terrific. You’ll notice that my mood had turned around and it wasn’t only because the charming arts district included a wine and cheese shop. Really. It started changing the moment that I walked into the exhibition hall of the book festival and discovered a stall stacked with vintage used books.

Because I write often about early 20th century science and murder (my book, The Poisoner’s Handbook, is set in 1920s and ’30s New York City) I love, collect, and occasionally even decorate with crime fiction from that period. I keep a 1910 edition of Mary Roberts Rinehart’s story of a sinister social club, The Window at The White Cat, in my dining room. When I pick up my 1930 edition of Dorothy Sayer’s tale of arsenic and murder, Strong Poison, I can almost feel mystery dusted across its powdery pages.

So basically I leaped into the air when I found that this book seller had a 1944 Detective Book Club anthology that began with an obscure story by the acclaimed crime fiction writer Dashiell Hammett.

The story was titled “Fly Paper.”

Oh, I said to myself, I’ll bet that’s about arsenic.

Act II:

I worry sometimes that I know too much about our poisonous history, that I’ve somehow archived in my memory too many stories of creative murder. But fly paper is actually one of more famous murder weapons in our toxic history.

For much of the 19th and early 20th century flypaper contained arsenic. So many products did; this was a time when society was remarkably casual about one of our most famous poisons. It wasn’t just in pest control products (fly paper, agricultural pesticides, rodenticides with catchy names like Rough-on-Rats). Arsenic formulas were used to color candy, wall paper, cake decorations, fabrics. They were tucked into medicines, tonics, cosmetics.

We marvel at this today, at the antique attitudes that allowed such risky chemistry through everyday life. But I suspect that a hundred years from now, our descendents will regard our industrial chemical policies with similar mockery. In his book, The Arsenic Century, science historian James Whorton makes a case that arsenic was a wedge chemical, that it helped pry open our acceptance of life with lethal compounds: “The infiltration of arsenic into everyday domestic life was the template for pollution in the modern industrial world, the pilot episode if you will….”

Certainly, we can make a case that homicidal poisoners found its presence remarkably handy. And in the case of fly paper, such killers had only to soak the paper in water until the poison leached out, then dose their victims with the liquid. Arsenic is almost tasteless, odorless poison and until forensic scientists figured out how to detect it in a corpse (it’s detectable for decades in hair and fingernails) it was beloved by murderers.

The first of those famous fly paper killings I mentioned involved an American woman, Florence Maybrick, accused of killing her British husband by soaking fly paper and pouring the resulting liquid into his meals. She was convicted by a London court in 1889 but because of evidence that her husband was in the habit of dosing himself with arsenic as a sexual pick-me-up, an appeals court decided that the case was too murky to justify execution. She served 14 years in prison before her release in 1904. Maybrick returned to the United States and died in Connecticut in 1941.

The second involved a British businessman and former solicitor named Frederick Seddon, who had been stealing the money of a lodger in his home, a woman who had entrusted him to manage her money. In order to gain access of all of her accounts, he poisoned her with flypaper water in 1911. The case was solved by two of two of Britain’s best known forensic scientists, Sir William Willcox and Bernard Spilsbury, who teased a dismaying quantity of arsenic out of the woman’s body. Seddon was hanged in 1912.

I’ve asked myself why these particular poisonings — in many ways average stories of greed and domestic unhappiness — are so well-known in the history of poison homicides. And my theory has to do with the cold patience of these murderers, these poisoners slowly soaking the lethal dose out of fly paper, and waiting, waiting for the right opportunity.

It’s that quality — that sense of the human spider carefully spinning out its web — that makes the best poison cases so memorable.

Act III

Dashiell Hammett published “Fly Paper” in 1929 in a pulp-fiction focused magazine, Black Mask. He was just beginning to make a name for himself in the genre of what people like to called hard-boiled detective novels. One of the classic examples, in fact, is Hammett’s detective Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, which the National Endowment for the Arts describes as one of the best crime novels ever.

Or according to the 1944 anthology I purchased, “Most experts agree that Dashiell Hammett reached his peak with the writing of The Maltese Falcon…. And here is a little-known, almost unknown, story by Hammett written just before he reached that peak – in fact, “Fly Paper” immediately preceded The Maltese Falcon in Hammett’s typewriter….”

You get a feel for his wonderfully clear and cold sense of story-telling with the very first line: “It was a wandering daughter kind of job.” The wandering daughter is a child of a wealthy New York family who rejects her luxurious life because she likes the thrill of playing house with gangsters. The narrator is a private detective hired by the worried father to keep track of the errant child.

And when he eventually finds her body, it’s a stash of flypaper that solves the mystery of her death. But the killer – in true Hammett style – is not found among the obvious suspects, not her racketeer boyfriend or her hit-man lover. “I can’t figure him as a poisoner,” the detective tells his agency boss. “He’s too rough. Unless he caught her trying to poison him and made her swallow the stuff. But that doesn’t account for the month-old arsenic in her hair.”

As I said, forensic chemists have known for a long time that arsenic creates a near permanent record in human hair. And Hammett and his mystery writing colleagues paid close attention to the toxicology of their time. I won’t give the ending of this story away. But it’s based in the same science that provided the solution to Dorothy Sayer’s arsenic-based mystery, Strong Poison, published just a year later. And I did give some of that away in a post I wrote earlier about her book, Instructions for a Deadly Dinner.

Beyond the poisonous solution, in both cases, these writers are spinning stories of friendships that can’t be trusted, love affairs undermined by betrayal. But Sayers believes more in redemption. Hammett’s view is darker. In his stories – even the more comedic novel, The Thin Man, treachery is a normal state of human relationships. And spiders lie in wait for all of us.

Act IV:

I tucked the book into my hotel room, gave my talk, hung out with some writer friends, and then ambled off to the downtown arts district where I acquired the previously mentioned supply of wine. Really, for reading Dashiell Hammett it should have been whiskey, preferably moonshine, but the South Dakota shop didn’t run to those kind of supplies.

So I sat in my room, cross-legged on the bed, a glass by my side and started to read. There’s something about a vintage book, as I said, that pulls you into the past. This one, printed in 1944, included an introduction that reminded readers that the anthology had been slow in the making because “there’s a war going on, and one of the trivial sacrifices on the home front is a shortage of paper.”

I read “Fly Paper” and toasted my prediction that it would be about arsenic. Thought about spiders, the human variety. And decided, really, I’d had enough of poison for the day. So I poured another glass of wine and started packing to go home.